Your Photos: Quality for what Purpose? Part 2

Last week I mentioned that many amateur photographers (like myself) take higher-resolution photos than they really need. Today I will consider the quality needed for your online Trip Journal.

As explained recently by John Vermilye in this blog, computer monitors are not capable of displaying pictures with anywhere near the detail that can be seen on photo paper.

Loading times and ‘pre-optimization’

You’ve likely noticed that some photos load much faster than others on your computer screen. This can be due to a number of factors including your internet connection speed, the size of your image, and its resolution. High-res photos can take much longer to load than low-res ones, especially if your connection speed is slow.

Since you can’t see high resolution on a computer screen, there’s usually no point in sitting around and waiting for it to load. That’s why many photos are ‘pre-optimized’ for the internet when they’re received in the first place; ‘pre-optimization’ being a euphemism for stripping out much of the quality to make a fast-loading photo that will still look good on a computer screen.

If you use the MyTripJournal system, your photos will be automatically pre-optimized for the internet at the moment you load them to our servers. The file size will be reduced to somewhere in the vicinity of 50K for fast-loading purposes. Here’s a beautiful photo published in our Sept. 2006 newsletter , posted by Tom Barker in his Trip Journal ‘Our Trip to Alaska‘:

“Can You Imagine Scaling This?”

Here’s the original size of this photo, loaded on the internet from the high-res version. Aside from being larger, can you see the difference in quality? Probably not, since you cannot see more than your computer screen can show you.

Access by Trip Journalers to their original quality photos

Premium Trip Journal subscribers have the ability to access their original quality photos, in several ways:

• Web archiving: You can retrieve all your photos in their original quality in bulk, by web download, whenever you wish. Instructions are found in your Archive Center.
• Archiving by mail: You can ask us to send your original photos to you by mail on a CD or DVD, along with an interactive copy of your Trip Journal (no additional charge; available for a minimum 6 months’ service). Again the original photos arrive in bulk.
• Links to individual photos: Trip Journalers can display a link on each photo page, allowing access to your original quality photo. To select this option, just visit your ‘Journal Options’ page from your Trip Journal’s Update Center. If you don’t mind sharing, this is really the best of both worlds: friends or family can access the original photo if they want to wait for it to load; otherwise they can view the computer quality photos quickly.

Lest you be concerned about privacy, there is yet another option. Premium subscribers who don’t want the general public access to their high quality photos, can also choose the ‘privacy’ option (‘Trip Journal Options’) requiring a visitor-access password before anyone can access any of your original resolution photos.

Next week I’ll finish up this series by summarizing what this all means to you!

Dan Parlow

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